Former Dixon mayor lands state Senate seat, wants to tackle state debt repayment, pensions, education spending

DIXON – A former Dixon mayor is getting ready for his new role in Springfield as a state senator representing the 37th District.

Li Arellano Jr., who won an uncontested race during Tuesday’s general election, said he is ready to hit the ground running for the 37th District, which includes all of Whiteside and Lee counties; most of Bureau County; and portions of DeKalb, Henry, La Salle, Marshall, Ogle, Peoria, Rock Island, Stark and Woodford counties. Arellano will serve a four-year term.

“I’m excited to get to work in the region,” Arellano said. “This is one of the biggest rural districts in Illinois, and one of my big goals is to travel quite a bit and talk to folks so that everyone can have a voice in the process.”

Although he will not vote on legislation until he is officially sworn in Wednesday, Jan. 8, he already is focused on improving several issues in Illinois.

“My first big focus is working on debt repayment plans to get the state out of debt,” Arellano said. “That is similar to what I worked on in Dixon during my eight years as mayor.”

Arellano served two consecutive terms as Dixon’s mayor, from 2015 to 2023. He came into office following former city Comptroller Rita Crundwell’s $53.7 million embezzlement scheme and worked to restore financial stability to Dixon. He also is part of Dixon’s Gateway Project, which already has brought several new businesses to the Interstate 88 corridor.

“I worked on getting the city’s finances healthy so we could begin investing into the infrastructure and economy of the city, and hopefully start bringing Dixon’s property taxes down,” Arellano said. “That’s the same stuff that’s going to be at the top of my start list getting to Springfield.”

Another issue Arellano said he plans to tackle is paying down pensions.

“About 19% of the state’s $54 billion budget is pension payments,” Arellano said. “That equates to about $8 billion a year. That’s money that isn’t going into mental health. It isn’t going into property tax relief, economic development or [the Department of Children] and Family Services, where we’ve had a lot of young kids who are wards of the court die because we just can’t staff or take care of their cases properly.”

Arellano said inefficiencies in local government finance can contribute to broader economic problems for the state, such as inflation and higher costs.

“One example is how the state government limits what cities can do with their finances,” Arellano said. “So, one of the things I did when I was mayor of Dixon is I helped lead an initiative to pay millions into the fire pension fund.”

Arellano said when the fire pension fund had less than $10 million, it saw significantly lower returns on investment compared with the police pension fund or the Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund, which meant less money was being generated for the city.

“One year, the IMRF got a 14% return,” Arellano said. “The fire pension fund was getting 4% to 5%, nearly 10% less. So, 10% on millions of dollars every year adds up. Do that math with municipalities all across Illinois, and that’s tons of money that should be going into those local governments. That’s not right.”

The state’s education spending is another concern for Arellano.

“We’re trying to make up funding in these school districts when we could just be making it cheaper for them to operate,” Arellano said. “Those are the little kinds of bills where, when you start adding them together and getting them across the line, [they] are kind of like a family getting out of debt. There’s no one silver bullet. You have to find a way of saving a few million dollars here, save a few million dollars there, and then once you start getting into the hundreds of millions, you can really start improving programs and catching up.”